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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

It's a winner-takes-all market and everyone wants to be the next Google and not the next Lycos or AskJeeves etc.

It'd be interesting to see what they spend all the money on though as we seem to be hitting diminishing returns and I'm not sure if the typical enterprise user really cares about small improvements on benchmarks.

It seems like it'd probably be better to spend all that on marketing, free trials, exclusivity/bundle deals etc. ChatGPT already has a strong advantage there as it has so much brand recognition. I've seen lay people refer to all LLM's as ChatGPT like my grandparents did with Nintendo and all video game consoles.

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It’s absolutely not winner take all. LLMs have become a commodity and the cost of switching models is essentially nil.

Even if ChatGPT has brand recognition amongst lay people, your grandparents aren’t the ones shelling out $200/mo for a Claude code subscription and paying for extra Opus tokens on top of that. Anthropic’s revenue is now neck and neck with OpenAI, but if tomorrow they increased the price of Opus by 5x without increasing its capabilities, many would switch to Gemini, GPT 5.4, Cursor, or any cheap Chinese model. In fact I know many engineers that have multiple subscriptions active and switch when they hit the rate limits of one, precisely the tools are so interchangeable.

At some point it could even become cheaper to just buy 8x H100s and host Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi/etc yourself if you’re one of those companies paying $3k/mo per engineers in tokens.

I have non-tech friends telling me about preferring other models like gemini, this feels like the early days of search engines when people were willing to switch to find better results.

Yep i have nontech friends and even the younger generation students talking about how Claude is better at certain tasks or types of homework problems lol.

If it's used as a tool not just search, then people will definitely talk about the other stuff. Students who rely on free tiers will also definitely just have everything bookmarked.

> It's a winner-takes-all market and everyone wants to be the next Google

absolutely isn't! if billed per token, there is no reason to be married to a single model family provider at all. the models have very different strengths and weaknesses, you should be taking advantage of this at all times.

people used to say this about search engines and web browsers, as well

regardless, eventually Google became the universal default for both. When it comes to software, the average person doesn't shop around for the technologically optimal choice, they just use what everyone else is using.

Google search is free to use. if they spike the models price up, people will look for alternatives

AI (that is, plain chat) is always going to be free to use as well. Google and Microsoft are going to keep it that way. And make the money back via ads.

That's why ChatGPT still has a free option. If they didn't, they would lose a billion users overnight to Gemini.

my point is today there is no clear winner. opus, gpt 5.4 and gemini have different strengths. google search was running circles around competition in basically all use cases.

Where to go next? I don't think anyone has gotten close to automating everyday PC usage, likely via screen capture and raw keyboard+mouse inputs. Imagine how much bigger would that market be than vibecoding.

tbh I don't think this use case is going to be as big as people seem to think

there are a lot of reasons, but in brief - I think AI desktop use is a product that the average person isn't going to get much value out of. to make an analogy - the creators of Segway thought people would buy them in large numbers, but it turned out most people don't mind walking manually (or at least, don't mind it enough to spend money on a scooter). I think makers of AI Desktop Use products are going to find out the same thing as it relates to everyday tasks like checking email and shopping.

I was thinking more remotely managing the computer in a warehouse, replacing the mouse of an architect, or some physical object engineer. That your grandma can finally find Discord by speaking to such a bot is just a nice side effect.

well yeah I wasn't even talking about professional use, since I think in professional use cases it will turn out make a lot more sense to set up APIs that AIs, use, than to set up screen scraping and mouse+keyboard use.

in fact even in rare cases where it's not possible to get an API or CLI to interface with some piece of software, I think people will find that their best bet is to first create a deterministic screen-scraping program for that specific software, then have that program serve an API for the AI to use. it would be so much cheaper to run (inference-wise) and so much more reliable, than having the AI itself perform the image interpretation and clicking.

I see AI desktop use as mainly a consumer product for that reason, since that's the situation where you have to react "on the fly" to whatever the user asks you to do and whatever program happens to be on their computer (versus professional cases which are more large-scale and repetitive, and where you can have a software developer on hand).

Automating GUI use is a silly idea when the AI can do much of the same things by getting access to a *nix command line - which is how all coding models work. It matters when driving proprietary apps or browsing websites that aren't providing a clean machine-readable API, not really otherwise.

I don't think it's winner-takes-all. Google is Google in 2026 because Lycos and AskJeeves were bad in comparison. The average user doesn't care whose LLM they're using because they're all close enough. It's hard to see past the bubble bursting, but I expect most people will use multiple of them depending on context (Copilot via the integration in windows, Gemini via Siri on their phone, etc), likely without paying.

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